Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [4]
Some notes about the cuisine and restaurant sections, “La Cuisine Française” and “À Table!,” are in order. Food, and the enjoyment of it, still holds a place of honor in French life, prompting Elizabeth Bard, in Lunch in Paris, to write, “So much of what I’d learned about France I’d discovered autour de la table—around the table.” Likewise, Suzy Gershman, in her book C’est la Vie, relates a revealing tale about the first time she made the French dessert clafoutis. Even though she’d cooked it for the proper amount of time, it appeared completely liquified. Just then her doorbell rang. It was the telephone repairman, and though he was there to fix a damaged telephone line, she explained her predicament with the clafoutis. He complimented her on its appearance and said that she simply had to let it cool and it would congeal, or she could put it in the fridge and it would set more quickly. “Only in France would the telephone repairman know how to rescue a clafoutis.” And as Edward Behr notes in his excellent journal The Art of Eating, “The French still care enormously about food. In a luxury restaurant in Paris not long ago, I felt an extraordinary sense of comfort and of intimate contact with craftsmen working without inhibition to accomplish their best. Even the welcome was a lesson in the craft of the server—not friendliness (there’s no skill in that) but a concern for my happiness during my time in the restaurant. I was certain that the warmth reflected pride in the chef, all the cooks, the entire restaurant.”
For all of these reasons and more, I hope you will take my book as merely the first step in investigating this crucial area of French culture. I have great respect for restaurant reviewers, and though their work may seem glamorous—it sometimes is—it is also very hard. It’s an all-consuming, full-time job, and that is why I urge you to consult the very good recommended cookbooks as well as restaurant guidebooks. Restaurant (and hotel) reviewers are, for the most part, professionals who have dined in hundreds of eating establishments (and spent hundreds of nights in hotels). They are far more capable of assessing the qualities and flaws of a place than I am. I don’t always agree with every opinion of a reviewer, but I am far more inclined to defer to their opinion over that of someone who is unfamiliar with French food in general, for example, or someone who doesn’t dine out frequently enough to recognize what good restaurants have in common. My files are filled with restaurant reviews, and I could have included many more articles, but that would have been repetitive and ultimately beside the point. I have selected a few articles that give you a feel for eating out in Paris, alert you to some things to look for in selecting a truly worthwhile place versus a mediocre one, and highlight notable dishes and culinary specialties visitors will encounter.
The recommended reading for each section in my book is one of its most important features and represents my favorite aspect of this series. (My annotations are, however, much shorter than I would prefer—did I mention that I love encyclopedias?—but they are still nothing